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2019 Week 4: Vegetarian

Short version: Why I don’t eat meat, some things I’m reading at the moment, and three photos from my week.

Long version:

Eating Less Meat

Since having moved to the United Kingdom, I’ve been eating less meat. The strongest motivation comes from a desire to minimise carbon impact and waste. The change has been made easy by meat substitutes being widely available and cheap (and delicious).

Evidence:
Intuitively, in order for humans to gain nutrition from an animal, that animal needs to consume either other animals or plants first. Given these processes cannot be completely efficient, there is always a lower energy cost to the environment to eat lower on the food chain. The real effect of this is described in the chart below.


High Protein Diets:
The CSIRO published a book advocating a high protein diet. It generated some controversy in part due to being funded by the meat industry. It still seems a high protein diet is healthy, but there is evidence swapping animal protein for plant protein lowers mortality overall.

More reading:
Publications from Nature and World Resources Institute about the impact of meat on climate change, which include the infographic above. Also, from a moral point of view, Consider the Lobster.

Stuff I read this week

Relevantly, restaurant reviews from the blog Vegan Eats Oxford. The Graduate Outcomes Survey was released. Matt Levine continues to write humorously about finance. Hybrid Perovskite Semiconductors are cool.

Photos: Cakes, Climbing, and Snow

  • Cupcakes at ONI
  • First snow for Oxford this winter
  • Having fun losing control

Writing from home.

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2019 Week 2: Habits and Goals

Short version: Building good habits makes good behaviours easier. Australians find their history confronting. Green Tea seems to be good for you. Birds have social media in Sydney.

Long version:

Habits, Mindfulness, and Technology.

At the start of 2018 I wrote “In short: learn,  improve my routine, write more.” I’ve noticed on returning to work this year that habits which felt like hard work at the start of last year are coming much more easily. Building a good routine gradually, consistently, and trying to avoid self-flagellation when I failed, has yeilded bigger benefits than I anticipated. This has been most easily observed around physical and mental health, where I’m getting up ealier, feeling more energetic through the day, and getting more exercise in.

On the other side is a reminder how powerful bad habits are. In a vlog this week John Green spoke about discovering just how often he types reddit into a browser when he quit social media. I think handling technology that is driven by so many smart people working to grab more of our attention to sell more advertising, is hard. One way I’m going to work to improve my relationship with tech this year is to make sure I have a purpose each time I interact with it. The aim is see it and use it as a tool, rather than be guided by it to burn time.

Australian History: “Slavery by Other Means”

My friend Seb wrote two articles on Pacific Islander Labour in 19th and early 20th Century Australia. My intial response to this brutal chapter of Austalian history was to attempt to trivialise it. Thoughts like “not as bad as other slavery”, “life was harsh for everyone back then”, and “life as a labourer wouldn’t have been that bad”. I would guess these are responses to shield myself from feeling, be it empathy or disgust or guilt or simply sadness. I’m not sure if an emotional engagement with history is preferable to a clinical intellectualism, but I do think the tendancy to avoid discomfort in historical interest is harmful. The extemes are feeling so strongly we are paralysed or act irresponsibly vs being callous to injustices, but the best place to sit between the extremes is not clear to me. I think both the article and the general principle are worth consideration.

Green Tea

It seems like drinking Green Tea is pretty good for you. I think all nutritional science suffers from difficulties collecting accurate data from inherently unreliable test subjects, but a quick search of google scholar seems to come up with a compelling set of results. I’m convinced enough to be swapping out some of my coffees for the world’s most popular brew.

Social Media for Birds (and Science)

Picture of the week is an Australian white ibis or Bin Chicken. Noticable is the yellow tag, which lets you know his name is Wazza. You can help him (and research) out by posting on social media for wing tagged birds.

Writing from home.


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2018 Week 8: Science Blogging

Week in Summary
I was sick this week, the international presence in Oxford is wonderful for diversity of both ideas and rhinoviruses. I continue to take (Latin) dance classes, at the novice level it still feels (and no doubt looks) a little silly, but there is fun to be had in silliness.  On Saturday I saw the Oxford Imps perform Improvised Cabaret at Modern Art Oxford. It was also a little silly, and it was certainly fun in its silliness. Life can sometimes be a little too serious, particularly in rigorous research, and they say laughter is good for the soul. On Sunday over brunch I learnt about container ships and efforts to commodify them.

Science Blogging
Further inspiration to keep on blogging came recently from Nature, and highlighted a couple of great blogs: DoctorAl (a biologist at Wilfrid Laurier University) and Scientist Sees Squirrel (an ecologist at University of New Brunswick). Another scientist to cross my news feed is the incredibly inspirational  Dr Emma Pooley.

Reading List
One of my goals for 2018 is to read 24 books. At that rate I ought to have finished four by now, however I have yet to finish even one. Instead I’ve been consuming: Instant Messages, Reddit, Forums, Academic Papers, Wikipedia, The Economist, and occasionally The New York Times (thanks to a free subscription courtesy of the google local guides program).

Currently the books on my desk are:

  • Clark, D. (2016). Alibaba: the house that Jack Ma built. HarperCollins.
  • Sasaki, F. (2015)  Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism Penguin
  • Thiel, P. A. & Masters, B. (2014). Zero to one: notes on startups, or how to build the future. Crown Pub.
  • Vance, A. (2017). Elon Musk. Editions Eyrolles.
  • Stone, B. (2013). The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. Random House.

Delays


This post comes several weeks late. I was a little ill the actual week of this blog, and predominantly work has cascaded into time that I would otherwise allocate to writing. As such it comprises ideas that came together in Week 8 of 2018, but actually was published on Monday of Week 12 (blog catch up week).

 

Writing from the office.

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2018 Week 5: Trolley Problems

There isn’t a unifying theme this week, just a mixture of things I’ve been thinking about.

Trolley Problems
Last night I attended a Raclette party and over deliciously melted cheese enjoyed conversing with American, British, Chinese, and Swiss friends. For most of the world, the prevalence of guns in the United States of America is frighteningly alien, and I recommended an episode of the podcast More Perfect about the history of the  Second Amendment which I found fascinating. Following speculation about situations where someone might use a gun, the discussion became a more abstract consideration of the trolley problem (there is also a relevant Facebook meme page).  I find it interesting that most people adopt the utilitarian perspective in the more foreign situation of pulling a lever to move a trolley, but if you reframe the decision where the actor is a doctor, the 5 are suffering failures of 5 different organs, and the 1 is an unknown backpacker come in for a check up, people find it intuitively more difficult to take the life of the stranger in the more familiar context. Perhaps this is an intuition about the risk of organ transplants making the lives of the ill less valuable than the life of this healthy traveller, or perhaps it is something about breaking the trust that the traveller imbues in the doctor. Clearly the characters tied to the tracks have no such relationship with the lever operator. One way in which this discussion is particularly timely is in considering self driving cars, who will need these decisions programmed into their code ahead of time. This MIT app lets you make judgements of such moral dilemmas, then gives you some feedback on your preferences, and you can even invent your own (the associated paper is here).

British Library
This week I visited the British Library. Each time I go I am struck by the scale of legal deposit. The system guarantees the British Library will hold a copy of every book (and some other text types) published in the United Kingdom, which some quick googling suggests is around 500 books a day, every day of the year. It can be confronting, particularly when I feel relatively poorly read, that such an unceasing torrent of new material is being created daily. Another perspective is several hundred hours of Youtube video are added every minute. In a world where there is so much information, it is a good reminder to treasure each unit of attention one has, and to invest it wisely. I hope, dear reader, you feel this is worth your time.

Motivation and Mental Health
This week I felt the first few cracks of trying to squeeze as many productive hours into a week as possible. On reflecting, I am reminded that positive feedback is important, and low motivation can be the result of too much focus on the negative. Setting up for “easy wins”, where you are able to make progress without much difficulty or excitement, can help build momentum to tackle more difficult tasks. I also need to improve sleep hygiene, checking the bright light of a smartphone in the middle of the night is not aiding rest and recovery.

Writing from the Radcliffe Camera

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2018 Week 2: What is your biggest failure?

Career
This was my first week at ONI and it was great. The team is brilliant, and represents almost as many countries as it has people. In my previous job, as in this one, a personal blog is not the place to discuss the specifics of work (that might be commercially sensitive), but it is an exciting and satisfying environment to be in.

Languages
I’m on a 14 day streak for Chinese on duolingo. I first heard about duolingo from the TED talk of Luis von Ahn, which is probably a little dated, but certainly interesting from a “history of crowd sourcing” perspective. Notably it seems to have grown to be much more about learning languages than translating the entire internet, which is not to say crowd-sourcing has been unsuccessful (see Niantic and PokemonGO). Freakonomics did a podcast about how (financially) valuable it is to learn a second language,  talking with Albert Saiz who wrote a paper. In short, it’s not particularly valuable, unless the second language you’re learning is English.

Reading
Before we get serious I’ve discovered a guy here called Chris McIntyre writes a weekly email called “Interesting Things I Come Across” and it lives up to its name.

Failing
There are some questions that seem to come up in interviews no matter the position or experience. Having a concise answer to “Tell us about yourself” or “why do want the position”.  One I found difficult is “What is your biggest failure”, and in answering it over and over I’ve started to make sense of it. My failure is quite literal. I failed a number of subjects during my studies at University. Specifically 8 discontinues, 6 absent fails, and 3 fails, from 2014 to 2016. It still stings to look that up, and look at a rather large hole in an otherwise reasonably good transcript. I’m still afraid to admit it.

For most of my life I held the foolish belief that it was impossible for me to burn out. I thought that I was intelligent, but lazy. I relied on the “Panic Monster” to push through days without sleep so I could start a term’s project a couple days before the deadline. I remember explaining the reason I had so overwhelmingly over-committed myself was that “I could never have the discipline to do things gradually over time, but I always managed to scrape through, so the best way to be efficient  was to do lots and lots of things”. These beliefs were so core to how I saw myself that eventually when I did burn out, it was took me 3 years to finally accept and change these unhealthy views.

Thankfully I’ve since learned that I, like most, do not have an unlimited capacity for pressure. That I do need rest. That being smart is not all that matters. That talent is important, but consistent application of effort over time counts twice as much. Perhaps most important of all, that it is OK to ask for help.

That’s an imperfect summary, but it is certainly a good place to start.

Written (mostly) from the Oxford Hackerspace.

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July 2017: Job Hunting and Rock Climbing

I left Sydney for Oxford in early July, so a month having elapsed, this is what I’ve been up to:

Job Hunting
My primary goal has been finding work. So far that looks like:

   Positions Considered             81
   Applications             16
   Rejections               6
   Recruiter Calls               4
   Interviews               3
   Offers               0

Unfortunately no offers. I’ve focused on jobs in Oxford, so have applied to positions from the university. In a wider search, reed has seemed more relevant to me than indeed,  and making a profile there has been the main source of calls from recruiters, which seems promising. It’s probably time to extend the search to include London, though I’m still hoping to find something here in Oxford.

Reading
Aside from many job descriptions, I’ve been reading Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution, The Economist, and reddit.

Hackerspace
Having become a member of the Oxford hackerspace, I’ve been helping out a little with the 3D printing service. Producing tangible objects is very satisfying in contrast to job hunting.

Fitness
I’ve tried two new activities: squash and rock-climbing/bouldering. My staples of running/cycling and weightlifting leave a gap over hand-eye coordination, which squash fills in well. After about 8 hours I think I’m starting to develop muscle memory for basic play. I was surprised to find climbing has a huge mental component; planning and executing the correct strategy seems just as important as strength. It’s certainly fun, and much more mentally involved than lifting weights or running, but for pure fitness training not as effective.

Chess
I’ve played 207 games of chess. I haven’t improved much, so should add structured training rather than just blundering repetitively through similar openings. It’s probably also been more procrastination than relaxation this month.

Berglabs
And, of course, I’ve resuscitated this domain and updated it with a WordPress theme.

Travel
Life has taken me to London (by train) and Eyam (by car).

Writing from the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford.